his own advantage, so that at the end of the day she was compelled to
speak with a firmness which impressed him.

"You have all but killed me, dear, once already, as you know," said
she. "If I were still an inexperienced girl, I might begin to
sacrifice myself afresh; but I am a mother, I have a daughter to bring
up, and I owe as much to her as to you. Let us resign ourselves to a
misfortune which affects us both alike. You are the less to be pitied.
Have you not, as it is, found consolations which duty and the honor of
both, and (stronger still) which Nature forbids to me? Stay," she
added, "you carelessly left three letters from Mme. de Serizy in a
drawer; here they are. My silence about this matter should make it
plain to you that in me you have a wife who has plenty of indulgence
and does not exact from you the sacrifices prescribed by the law. But
I have thought enough to see that the roles of husband and wife are
quite different, and that the wife alone is predestined to misfortune.
My virtue is based upon firmly fixed and definite principles. I shall
live blamelessly, but let me live."

The Marquis was taken aback by a logic which women grasp with the
clear insight of love, and overawed by a certain dignity natural to
them at such crises. Julie's instinctive repugnance for all that
jarred upon her love and the instincts of her heart is one of the
fairest qualities of woman, and springs perhaps from a natural virtue
which neither laws nor civilization can silence. And who shall dare to
blame women? If a woman can silence the exclusive sentiment which bids
her "forsake all other" for the man whom she loves, what is she but a
priest who has lost his faith? If a rigid mind here and there condemns
Julie for a sort of compromise between love and wifely duty,
impassioned souls will lay it to her charge as a crime. To be thus